Interview: Dr. Angel Adams Parham

The Fare Forward Interview with Dr. Angel Adams Parham

Dr. Angel Adams Parham is Associate Professor of Sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC) at the University of Virginia. She is the author of American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race (Oxford, 2017) and co-author with Dr. Anika Prather of The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature (Classical Academic Press, 2022). Dr. Parham is the co-founder and executive director of Nyansa Classical Community, an educational organization which provides curricula and programming designed to connect with students from diverse backgrounds, inviting them to take part in the Great Conversation, cultivate the moral imagination, and pursue truth, goodness, and beauty. She has been a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright grant. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and completed her doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I think I always had an interest in how to make the world a better place.

Fare Forward: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Fare Forward for our Kingdoms of Knowledge issue. We’re trying to ask the questions behind the “Big Questions” about life and meaning, like, Which questions should we ask? And how will we know when we find the answers? I’d love to start with a little bit of your background. Can you tell us about what kind of school you went to when you were growing up?

Dr. Parham: Sure. I did public school all the way. I did a lot of zigzagging to get to public schools that had special programs, like music programs, and places that were more academically accelerated. So I kind of jumped around. We did research, got to the schools that we liked, and that was how I got through K12.

FF: You’re now a professor of sociology. What first attracted you to the field of sociology?

AP: That’s a good question. I think I always had an interest in how to make the world a better place. You know, I think a lot of kids have that interest, but I took it maybe a little bit further than most. When I was in seventh grade, I created my own society called Ourlandia. And I created Ourlandia because I just felt like we were not doing a good enough job.

So I reformed our education system: I decided—and this is no negative reflection on my mother; my mother was great—but I felt that parents needed more training, and so you would have to get permission before you could have children. So it’s a bit of an authoritarian society, I’m sorry to say. But basically, you would have to put in so many hours at your church nursery to show that you could interact appropriately with children, and you had some experience, before getting married. I had this kind of intense tracking system starting in elementary school so that we could put our resources to the best use and train people. So it was a little authoritarian.

Then I set about drafting citizens, you know, trying to get citizens to join Ourlandia. And I did get one citizen in, I think it was in my seventh-grade class. One of my best friends became a citizen and signed up her papers, and then I approached my mom. Well, by the time I told her all about Ourlandia and our laws, she declined. She said, “Um, I don’t think Ourlandia is for me.” [laughs] So I was thinking along those lines early on.

But then by the time I got to college, I thought I was going to go into English and be an English professor, because I also loved reading, just loved reading books. But it went in a different direction, and I ended up with sociology.

FF: I was reading through your book, The Black Intellectual Tradition, and I was particularly struck by what you said in the introduction about how reading simplified classical texts along with your daughters, and then subsequently reading the full versions yourself, deepened your understanding of your field. Can you expand a little bit on what you saw in those texts and how it connected to that initial attraction of yours to understanding and developing societies?

AP: I got through all of my education, all of my higher education, without reading the classics, at least for the most part. I read some Shakespeare here and there. But when I set about educating my girls (we homeschooled for 13 years), I thought, I’ve never read these things. I’ve never read Homer. I’ve never read all of these great authors. And then I started to get curious about some of the philosophers I hadn’t read, like Plato and Aristotle, and I started reading those on my own. And I was taken also by the larger mission of classical education, of the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. And I think it’s that in particular, the cultivation of truth, goodness, and beauty, that pervades classical education, and that is one of the reasons that there’s a focus on these great texts, and that is what really captured me and connected back to that early desire to help to make a better world.

So I’d been teaching sociology for a very long time, and I would teach social and political inequality, social problems, classes on race and racism. And then I was also at the time the director for the Social Justice Scholars. So I was spending a lot of time thinking about justice issues, doing service learning in the community; I founded an educational nonprofit to work in my community, which was largely low-income and African American. And I thought, through all of this, it’s not as if I have a foundation in thinking about questions of justice, thinking about what have been some of the great answers to that question of “What is justice? What is a good society?” And it just seemed to me odd to have given so much focus to sociology, where I think people are implicitly interested in these questions but are not explicitly asking them or consulting these great texts going back to antiquity and that whole conversation that has been going on literally for millennia around these questions.

And it just seemed to me more and more odd that that was the case. And so I started to find places where I could take seminars for eight to ten weeks on philosophy and start to read some of these texts myself. And right before I moved to UVA, at my other institution in New Orleans, a small liberal arts college, I started to revamp the curricula for the Social Justice Scholars to say, why don’t we have some carefully curated seminars that allow our students to ask these deep questions and read these great texts? And so that’s what I was doing. And I got to teach one of them right before I made the transition.

I wanted a situation where I could just be there with my kids, almost like a little seminar, and we could discuss ideas and art.

FF: To go back a little bit chronologically, what made you decide to homeschool your daughters?

AP: We were in New Orleans, and New Orleans has had a fairly troubled history in terms of education, at least public education. It’s very, very stratified by race and by class. There’s a handful of very sought-after public schools, and then the vast majority have been struggling for a very long time. And there’s a large percentage that send their kids to private school. So at the time that we were making this decision, I talked to my husband, and I said, I have a feeling that it would be possible to homeschool, even though I am also working full-time. My classes tend to be two days a week as it is. I thought that there was a way between his job—he’s a contractor, so he works on projects for a few weeks or months at a time, and then he’s at home for good stretches—and I thought between the two of us, we could probably handle it. So I said, let’s take our daughters out of the campus daycare for pre-K4.

So my oldest was going to be entering pre-K4. The youngest was one. And I figured I couldn’t mess up pre-K4 too badly, so I ordered a really wonderful little literature-rich curriculum and brought her home at four. A lot of it consisted of reading wonderful stories. And I just saw her blossoming. I would be able to read her these really very involved, fairly dense stories—children’s stories, but from an earlier era, like early 20th-century, so the language is totally different. There are no big bright pictures, it’s just story. And she would just sit there for like 20 minutes at a time, absorbing it like a sponge. And I wanted a situation where I could just be there with my kids, almost like a little seminar, and we could discuss ideas and art—and homeschooling was a way to do that.

FF: Would you, looking back, do anything differently about that curriculum or how you did homeschooling? Or do you have any advice for people who are looking at homeschooling?

AP: Well, I would still homeschool. Because it was, it’s just been, such a blessing. And it was also very, very, very challenging. We only changed when I moved here to the new position [at UVA]. I just felt like I was not going be able to keep doing it. And they were getting older, they were entering seventh and tenth grade, and I had already started outsourcing the science and Latin and that kind of thing.

So I guess I would say for those who are thinking about it—and I guess it’s a different kind of conversation if you’re working or not working at the same time, because it’s different kinds of stress. But I would say, if a family, if the parents, are willing to juggle some things and make the inevitable sacrifices in terms of time and money to do it, it is an absolute privilege and blessing to do it. It is just so good for family dynamics. My daughters have a really close relationship. They did not have homework until they moved into an actual school setting here, and now the evenings are just completely different because they have homework. Whereas when you don’t have homework, then you have more time for each other, more time for the family, more time to rest.

So I would say to keep an open mind about various ways of doing homeschooling. I know people who have leaned on relatives who are close by; if you’re working, maybe a grandmother is available and they’re willing to help watch the kids sometimes while you’re at work. We worked with caregivers; we tried to establish relationships with people over time, for years at a time if we could. They were paid to come in, and I would do the main lesson and then I would leave a list of what they were supposed to accomplish while I was gone. So that person who came in was not teaching, but they were making sure that the girls were doing their assignments. And then I would come back and do corrections and then teach the new material. And I know some who work who maybe do more of the homeschooling on the weekends or in the evenings.

So I would just say be creative, be open. The kids just have so much more freedom. They could go to the museum in the middle of the day, to the playground, spend a lot of time at the library. So it doesn’t look the way people expect school to look—but there are a lot of good things about it not looking the way people expect school to look. And I would say also that they made the transition into a fairly rigorous classical Christian school with flying colors. So for those who are thinking, “Oh, I just can’t do it,” there are ways. And there are so many co-ops, there are now more and more university-model homeschools where the kids go three days a week, maybe for half a day or full day, and then are at home the rest of the time. So there are a lot of options out there to make it doable.

I tend to think in terms of braiding the traditions together and looking at how they’re already speaking to each other.

FF: You’ve talked both in your book and in this interview about your commitment as a classical educator to cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty in your students. Where did those ideals come from, and how did you arrive at that commitment?

AP: Those are the transcendentals that go back to philosophy in antiquity. And the idea is that these are some of the ultimate goods in life. And so ordering ourselves according to truth, goodness, and beauty is what allows us to live lives of virtue. So it’s not anything that I created or came up with. That is at the heart of classical education: the pursuit of these transcendentals.

There’s also a focus on the idea of ordering the affections or the loves of our students from when they’re very, very young. Aristotle and Augustine talk about this. Aristotle talks about it in the Nicomachean Ethics: the idea that it’s so important from when children are very young to order what they love properly, so that they love what is good and lovely and that they hate what is not, what is vice-filled. So that is deeply rooted in a pursuit of classical education. And it’s not anything I had heard of before I got into classical education, but then when I did, it just made a lot of sense to be able to cultivate that in our students and to help them to develop a discernment and a taste for what is good. Rather than having this sense of whatever goes, or you define your own good, there is a sense that there really are some things that are better than others.

In Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis talks about this, as well—that just because we say we’re not all Christian, or we don’t all share the same tradition, doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things that are just more lovely or good than others. And he talks about how in many of these different traditions you could go to, in Buddhism or in Christianity, what’s interesting for Lewis—he’s a committed Christian—but in that book, Abolition of Man, what he is saying is that there’s more convergence than not among great traditions of many cultures and times on basic ideas. Like that it’s not good to murder, it’s not good to steal. If we look at all of those, at what they have in common, they have quite a lot in common. And he uses that to say, we should not abandon the pursuit of what is true, good, and beautiful as some educators were trying to do at the time—to say, well, we don’t have any shared standards, so therefore we can’t assume there are any. He says, no, the great wisdom traditions of the world, yes, they have important differences. They’re not all the same. But in many ways, they converge on areas of what is good and beautiful and worth pursuing.

FF: Let’s dive a little bit deeper into The Black Intellectual Tradition specifically. For an instructor who has been teaching classical texts and wants to add new material and engage with different cultures without resorting to what I think you called a knee-jerk kind of diversity, where would you recommend they start? Other than of course reading your book.

AP: I tend to think in terms of braiding the traditions together and looking at how they’re already speaking to each other. So when you are taking this approach—Mortimer Adler called it the Great Conversation; you know, the great conversation on these lasting questions: What is the good life? What is justice? What is freedom? And so on—When you take that kind of approach, I think it can be a lot easier to weave these various voices together, because you can look at who are voices from these great traditions, from the Black intellectual tradition, from readings at the center of the Western canon. Where are the voices who’ve been having that conversation already?

What is wonderful about the Black intellectual tradition is that so many of those writers were classically educated, and they’re already citing classic texts. So if you read Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, it is just threaded through with references to philosophy, to classical mythology, to all kinds of great readings. And so it’s quite possible to read between the traditions that way. Look at who he’s reading, who he’s citing, and those are some of the same ones that your students can look at as well.

Then there are figures like Phyllis Wheatley. If you’re doing history, she was very much present at the American Revolution—not on the battlefield, but in the realm of ideas and the defense of the idea of liberty. So she is living in Boston, right around the corner from the Boston Massacre. She’s right there, in the middle of things. Again, not out on the streets necessarily, but she is hearing the latest, getting all the conversation, writing about it, reflecting about it in her poetry. She had a letter exchange with George Washington and wrote a poem to him, praising his work as a general. Benjamin Banneker, who was in many ways self-taught mathematically—he had a letter exchange with Thomas Jefferson. So if one is teaching a unit on history, there are ways to weave in the Black intellectual tradition there, as well. You get these two wonderful Black writers who are engaged actively in this discussion of what really is freedom and how can you say that Black people are not worthy of that? It gets you in the Great Conversation and into the specifics, especially in U.S. history.

You get a little bit of a glimpse of what it might have been like in ancient Greece.

FF: How do you encourage students to consider the great works that they’re reading in conversation with each other? If you’re not looking at someone who is having a direct conversation, how do you bring those threads together for your students

AP: I do it by finding common themes. For instance, for at Nyansa Classical Community, which is the nonprofit that I cofounded that brings classical education to under-resourced communities, we are right in the middle of writing an exciting curriculum right now for upper school students. It combines study of the Iliad—we do a retelling of the Iliad—with the Legend of Sundiata from Mali. The Malian epic is a much more recent epic, from the 13th century. And what it does is, it gives us a glimpse into a more recent oral tradition of the epic. What you find in reading the Iliad together with the Legend of Sundiata, is you see in both these protagonists, these heroes who are going through adversity, who are consulting the gods for wisdom—it’s very interesting to read them together. And you see a lot of overlapping themes also.

You still have a tradition of griots, chroniclers and storytellers of the oral tradition, in Africa today. And so one can learn from that, from studying that tradition. You get a little bit of a glimpse of what it might have been like in ancient Greece, because now when people are studying the Iliad or the Odyssey, they’re sitting at their desk, they’re opening a book, they’re making notes—but that’s not what it was like, right? These were sung epics, they were part of the community experience, and that is closer to what you get now in medieval and contemporary Africa, where the epics are still more of a living and oral tradition. And so reading those two together, it helps to open your eyes because they speak to each other in terms of what is an epic? What is an oral tradition? How was that lived out? How does that pass on in chronical history in a different way than the way we write histories now? So that’s one example.

Another example is where the themes are very closely connected. I will pull excerpts from Frederick Douglass’s narrative where he’s learning how to read and he is having this whole revelation about the essence of freedom being not only losing your chains, but also being enlightened and your mind being opened, and I would pair that with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, because you get a lot of the same issues there of what does it mean to be free? What does it mean to be oppressed and chained in the darkness? How do you get to the light? So when you have those kind of intersecting themes, that’s another way that I will pair them.

FF: That’s really fun. And what would you say to someone who says there isn’t room to add to the classical canon—that there isn’t time to read everything, so why would I add these things?

AP: I’d say they’re correct that there is not time to read everything. Everyone has to make choices, and it depends on what one’s ultimate aim is. So if the ultimate aim is to get through a predetermined book list, then maybe they will not be able to read any of these authors that I’m talking about.

If, however, their aim is to cultivate students in truth, goodness, and beauty, then I’d say that it’s going to be very hard for them to do that without bringing in multiple perspectives and voices. If you want to get to the essence of what it means to be free, Black writers who have been enslaved are going to have something to say about that that’s going to be very important to listen to. So Douglass’s narrative, like I said, reading that together with the Allegory of the Cave is a very, very powerful combination. And we find that in other parts of the Black intellectual tradition too. Huey Newton, who was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, also found Plato’s Republic spoke to him, and particularly the Allegory of the Cave. So again, he’s sharing this with people on the street, saying, “This is something that we have to really think about. What is the essence of what it means to be free? It’s not just that we’re not enslaved, but we’re still not free. So what is it that’s keeping us down?” And so I’d say that it depends on your goals. You’re correct. You cannot read everything. Do we have to get through the list? Or are we trying to really cultivate truth, goodness, and beauty? In which case we need to have more of a tapestry than a list.

We need to have more of a tapestry than a list.

FF: What are some of your favorite books and stories to teach?

AP: Well, I think I’ve been saying some of them. Oh, goodness. But yeah, I do love Du Bois. He is one of my favorites, and especially because he was a sociologist. He meets so many of my interests. He’s a sociologist of a very different kind: he was trained broadly. He was trained in the classics, he was trained in sociology, he knew the Black intellectual tradition and Black history and culture, and he was able to weave them together seamlessly, just seamlessly. So I like to teach writers like that. You see this virtuoso weaving together of the various traditions.

And I don’t necessarily teach her, but I do talk about her in my book—Toni Morrison, who is another one of these who weaves traditions together really seamlessly. She’s looking at African American culture, Biblical tradition, Black intellectual tradition, the classics, and I think others have said it’s like fine jazz that you’re listening to, that it’s just expertly and seamlessly weaving together this beauty. I like to teach writers like that, because I think it gets students thinking, and what it does, I hope, is to invite my students to read the classics as a foundation, but to also see that they have to read their own times and their own culture and see how they’re speaking to each other. And I think writers like this, like Du Bois, like Anna Julia Cooper, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison—they do that. So they get this grounding in the classics, but then they’re also very attentive to who they are and where they’re from, and they weave all of that together very nicely.

FF: Wonderful. Thank you again for being willing to take the time to talk with me.